Crime had all the signs of being a ‘professional job’

March 2005

THE GANG that carried out the robbery in a supermarket car park in Arklow on Friday last had their homework done, Gardaí believe.

While ruling nothing in or out in their investigations at the moment, police chiefs are inclined to believe that there was no local involvement in the theft of the €125,000 from a Securicor van delivering money to an ATM machine at Tesco.

Garda investigators have also ruled out an link between the robbery at Tesco with the discovery of a hoax bomb on the doorstep of a house in Gorey less than two hours earlier that day. There had been suspicions that the dud bomb device may have been planted as a decoy to divert gardaí away from Arklow to Gorey, thus clearing the way for gang to carry out its daylight robbery of the ATM-bound banknotes.

Supt John Roche, who is heading up both Garda investigations in Arklow and Gorey, said that the hoax bomb in Gorey is ‘purely a local matter’ and they are carrying out a definite line of enquiry there.

However, the robbery at the Tesco car park in Arklow ‘is not a local matter’ and Supt. Roche confirmed on Tuesday that they are following all avenues of enquiry at this stage, subversive as well as criminal, and are not ruling out the possibility that paramilitaries could have been involved in the heist.

Yet police investigators are inclined more to the belief that the robbery at Tesco’s was the work of a criminal gang from Dublin as the modus operandi bore similarities to robberies involving security vans and money transit vans in 2004.

And the Gardaí believe that armed raid on the security van in Arklow may be linked to a robbery in Co. Kildare in which a security guard was shot two months earlier.

The drama at the Tesco car park began around 1.40 p.m. on Friday after the Securicor van drove in and parked opposite the ATM machine which was being reloaded with bank notes in €50, €20 and €10 denominations.

The Gardaí have yet to establish if the three man gang followed the van into the carpark in their stolen silver Peugeot 407 car or if they were already parked and waiting to pounce. The men, who were aged between 20 and 30, were wearing shirts and ties while they waited to avoid attracting suspicion.

Supt Roche said: ‘ It is still very early days in our investigation. We will not be jumping in and making an early arrest just for the sake of it. We are now into the slow and painstaking process of getting statements and collecting detailed evidence which we hope will lead to early arrests’.